THE NEW YORK TIMES BUSINESSTUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020 Y B5
VIRUS FALLOUTAs the United States slowly, haltingly
reopens, hotels are trying to persuade
Americans to make this the summer of
the road trip.
Although some hotels have kept a
trickle of guests coming through the
doors by catering to essential workers,
people seeking a change in scenery and
willing to drive to a vacation spot are
the industry’s lifeline for the foresee-
able future. A good number of hotels in
the country remain closed. Most busi-
ness travel and nearly all group book-
ings remain on hold, and many trav-
elers are reluctant to take unnecessary
plane trips.
“Everything that we’ve seen and read
was pointing to the summer of the drive
market and drive destinations,” said
John Davies, vice president of market-
ing at Benchmark Resorts & Hotels.
Jan Freitag, senior vice president for
STR, a lodging consulting firm, agreed
that many people would want to drive
somewhere after months of being large-
ly stuck at home. “It’s not going to be
very hard to convince people to drive
because they just want to get away,” he
said.
So, hotel marketing campaigns are
leaning into nostalgia, invoking the
familiar tropes of the family car ride to
a beach, the mountains or a national
park. “This is really going back 50
years or more when people were very
eager to get in the car and drive,” said
Chekitan Dev, professor of marketing
and branding at the School of Hotel
Administration at Cornell University.
While the campaigns may evoke an
earlier era, hotel marketing depart-
ments are interacting with would-be
travelers on social media and using web
browsing data analytics to figure out
which images, activities and places
people search for when they think
about a getaway.
Benchmark rolled out a summer road
trip campaign that divides the United
States into seven regions, highlighting
outdoor activities and local attractions
in each. “We felt that all they needed
was the motivation to give them a rea-
son to leave the house,” Mr. Davies said.
“We put a huge focus on that with a
message that’s more comforting and
uplifting and kind of inviting for people
to kind of get away from the chaos of
the crisis.”
That is a shift from the messaging
hotels rolled out during the initial surge
of the pandemic in the spring, when
their marketing was largely focused on
cleanliness. Hotel chains promoted
their stepped-up sanitation standards
and partnerships with cleaning product
brands like Lysol and Mr. Clean.
The first step was moving toward
something a bit more optimistic.
“We knew that once the industry and
our company had established the fact
that we were adhering to strict cleanli-
ness standards, that could become a
little bit of an assumption that the con-
sumer would make,” said Jeff Doane,
senior vice president of sales and mar-
keting for Accor North and Central
America. “With that established, we
were able to be much more promotional
about the experience you’d be able to
have at the hotels.” Accor recently
started a campaign with tongue-in-
cheek depictions of people snorkeling in
the bathtub and lounging in a pool float
on the living room carpet.
“What we found in the search results
and feedback we were getting from
guest experiences is people just wanted
to get out of the house,” Mr. Doane said.
Hotel brands have also had to adjust
to the uneven patchwork of plans and
protocols imposed by state and local
governments, along with the suspension
or even reversal of opening-up plans.
“Not everything is accelerating or
coming back as fast,” Mr. Davies said,
which is why Benchmark used what hecalled a “hyper-regional” approach.
The focus on regional and short-haul
markets is changing how hotels commu-
nicate with travelers and giving a much
bigger role to social media channels.
“The messages are getting a little bit
more specific,” said Bjorn Hanson, a
hotel industry consultant. “This is a
property-by-property environment —
each really has to have its own unique
messaging.”
Given that many pools, spas, gyms
and restaurants remain closed or are
operating in only a limited capacity,
hotels are promoting nearby parks,
scenery and vistas along with simple
activities that are easy to do while
maintaining social distance. The Fair-
mont Scottsdale Princess has held
drive-in movie nights, playing family-
friendly cartoons and comedies in its
parking lot, while Kimpton hotels in
Winston Salem, N.C., and Los Angeles
created pop-up “bodegas” with premade
snacks and bottled cocktails for guests
while their restaurants were shuttered.“The promotion message is easy, but
delivering the experience is a chal-
lenge,” Mr. Hanson said.
Figuring out where people daydream
about going is another key part of the
equation. Hotels are using data points
like Google search results and the ad-
dresses of the people doing the search-
ing to see what — and where — they
are viewing.
“We’re in a situation where most of
our traditional data signals don’t really
help us in the current environment,”
said Julia Vander Ploeg, global head of
digital at Hyatt Hotels Corporation.
“We’ve had to get very creative and
layer on different data points to under-
stand how to promote this gradual
rebuild of leisure travel.”
Kathleen Reidenbach, chief commer-
cial officer at Kimpton Hotels & Re-
sorts, said Kimpton started by asking
guests, “ ‘Where are you looking to
travel?’ ” When people responded to
surveys or queries posted on social
media that they wanted to visit poolsand beaches, she said, the brand
worked with individual properties to
play up their aquatic offerings. “As you
go to our website, there is a lot of con-
tent about beach destinations, and now
we’ve pivoted a lot of imagery over to
the pool. It’s really impacted our con-
tent strategy,” she said.
Executives say they also are relying
more heavily on their own internal data
analytics, including what pages people
look at or what images make them click
to learn more, as well as surveys and
social media feedback. “Social is play-
ing a unique role right now,” Ms. Van-
der Ploeg said. “I believe people are
using that for signals of how we feel
about travel.”
To that end, hotels also need to be
sensitive to the perspective of people
who might want to book a vacation
someday — but not just yet.
Mr. Doane, of Accor, said the com-
pany has tried to strike a balance be-
tween sounding eager to receive guests
while conveying that it is not rushing
headlong into reopening. “There are
some people who feel cooped up and
want to go out and do something, and
others just aren’t ready to do that yet.”Vacation 2020: Pack the Kids Into the Car
As stir-crazy families long for escape, but not on an airplane, hotels promote the old-fashioned road trip.
Itineraries
By MARTHA C. WHITE
Top, guests watching a movie in socially distant circles at the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess in Scottsdale, Ariz. Left, Aeriell
Aguilar, 10, and her brother Damien, 2, waiting atop a car for a drive-in screening to begin. Center, guests peering into a pool at
the hotel. Right, children enjoying a screening, typically an animated feature or other family-friendly fare.PHOTOGRAPHS BY CAITLIN O’HARA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESing to target with Lysol, coming up with a
product that will help us maintain clean-
liness during flight on board the airplane.
It doesn’t sound terribly glamorous, but
it’s incredibly important to our people.
Delta has already teamed up with the
Mayo Clinic. How has that
partnership informed what you do?
The Mayo Clinic partnership is phenom-
enal. They’ve been looking at our prac-
tices and policies with a very critical eye.
They are also helping us develop our pro-
gram to test all of our employees, not
only the active virus but for the antibod-
ies. Once we have all of our employees
baseline tested, who do we then retest, at
what frequency, and what are all the fac-
tors to determine that? The Mayo Clinic
has a very sophisticated algorithm that
they’re building to help with that.
They’re providing general education to
our employees and sitting on an advisory
panel for us, too, so that we have an op-
portunity to run new policies, pro-
cedures and technologies by them.
Few people are traveling these days.
Who are they?
Well, those who are providing essential
services have continued to fly through-
out the pandemic — doctors, nurses, crit-
ical workers who support the economy,
government, and other key organiza-
tions. Also, many must fly personally,
whether it’s for a funeral, some small
family event, or someone is sick. But
business travel is still very depressed.What do customers say they need
before they’re willing to fly again?
They want to be assured that airlines
have very comprehensive social distanc-
ing and aircraft cleaning policies. But I
think the real key to why they aren’t trav-
eling is because restaurants, hotels, car
rental facilities, other businesses, either
have significant restrictions or aren’t
even opened up. They’re not flying just to
fly, they’ve got something that they want
to do.Delta was early to block middle seats
and is going to continue through
September. But that policy doesn’t
guarantee six feet of distance. Why
keep it up?
Our position all along has been we are
going to take a multilayered approach.
That means more frequent replacement
of the HEPA filters that are part of our air
circulation system, enforcing wearing of
masks, making sure that we minimize
the touch points with our customers and
having space between you and the per-
son closest to you. So we are looking to
ensure that we are driving the probabil-
ity of any kind of transmission very, very
close to zero. All of the medical guidance
we’ve received says that more space is
more protective. So, yes, it’s not six feet,but it’s better than having someone
shoulder to shoulder with you.How have passenger needs changed
during the pandemic?
Well, the order of priorities is different.
Price and schedule flexibility used to be
one of the most important factors. While
those are still part of the mix, customers
have placed the highest priority on two
things: social distancing, whether that’s
in the airport, lobbies, gate areas, jet
bridges or on board the airplane, and
cleanliness.You’ve continued to fly weekly during
the pandemic. How has that informed
your work?It’s interesting because while I have my
eyes on the operation, we have flight at-
tendants and pilots and gate agents and
others who are on board that aircraft ev-
ery minute of every day. They hear from
our customers in ways that we may not
through a survey. For example, the deci-
sion that we made months ago to start
boarding the airplane from back to front
rather than by zones. That came from a
flight attendant who heard from a
customer in first class, who said, “Maybe
you should put us on last because every-
one who is sitting behind me is walking
right by me.”Delta and others have implemented a
lot of new health and safety policies.What more is there to do?
This is why we partnered with Lysol and
the Mayo Clinic. We want to hear from
them. We’re looking for a critical eye to
help us fill any gaps and push the bound-
aries. It is my opinion that in three to six
months, there are going to be some prod-
ucts on our airplanes that I’m not even
contemplating right now. And, by the
way, we’re never going to be done with
this. We’ve built an organization at Delta,
a global cleanliness division with a vice
president of the company who leads it,
and the purpose is solely to continue to
push the boundaries of cleanliness and
sanitization and protection for our
customers and our employees.Delta has brought back alcohol,
restored automatic upgrades for elite
members and reopened some
lounges. Do customers still care
about these kinds of perks?
Not all of them do, but some of them do.
And this is where we really have to evalu-
ate the feedback. But one thing is clear
for us and we make this clear to our
customers: We will not compromise
their safety. We’ll listen to their feedback
and take action, provided we can find a
way to do it safely. In some cases, we’ve
had to say no for the time being. In other
cases, like the limited beer and wine of-
fering in first class and comfort plus, we
found a way to serve that without adding
any more touch points.Delta Exercises Caution
In the Service of Safety
FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE
Last week, Delta demonstrated its
disinfection procedures for the press. On
Monday it announced a partnership with
Lysol’s parent company.MICHAEL A. MCCOY/GETTY IMAGES